Digg Traffic Spike is not Sustainable?

A few days ago I questioned if Digg traffic would sustain a long-term growth. It’s been a few days after the spike of my post on Marissa Mayer’s keynote speech (I was the only blogger in the audience that posted in real time) and it paid off.

I live my blog traffic pretty transparently, (I mean, why hide it anyways) as a social experiment as I’m very focused on Social Media Measurement to see what works and what doesn’t. You can also see previous metrics I posted on the 1 year birthday of this domain.

Findings? I don’t believe that Digg traffic provides long-term sustainable traffic for the following reasons: 1) It’s more of ‘viral’ or ‘spike’ traffic that hits and moves on 2) I’m not writing about the right content that the Digg audience cares for. I may be wrong, are any of you from the “Digg Army” and have stuck with me?

While I see a little bit of a long term effect, I can’t conclude that it’s a direct result of Digg traffic. I don’t see any growth in feed subscriptions either. Maybe there’s a long term ‘imprinting’ type of effect that may happen if one gets on Digg over and over, but I doubt that will happen in the near future.

Above: Click to view a screenshot of Google Analytics, and see bump from Digg.com: Nearly 12,000 readers in 48 hours.

Above: The free service Alexa has a similar trend, although it appears more smoothed out

Above: little uptake in subscribed readers according to feedburner (which the pro account is now free for everyone)